English Renaissance

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English Renaissance

• 1485-1660

2
Tudor Period/Age

• 1485-1558
• Tudor is the family name of a line of monarchs
• Also known as the Humanist Era
• Introduction of humanist prose, the sonnet, and
  blank verse
• Topics of education and good government and love
• Representative authors include Thoma More, John
  Skelton, Thomas Wyatt

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Themes/Concepts/Ideas/Inventions of the English
Renaissance

• The religious devotion of the Middle Ages, with
  its emphasis on an afterlife, gave way to a new
  interest in the human being's place here on
  Earth. (Humans are the measure of all things.)
• Universities introduced a new curriculum called
  the humanities, which included history,
  geography, poetry, and modern languages.
• The invention of printing from movable type made
  books more available to people than ever before,
  and literacy increased. This is also the
  beginning of Modern English.

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Themes/Concepts/Ideas/Inventions Contd

• Although scholars and students still used Greek
  and Latin to study the ancients, more and more
  writers began to use the vernacular (the local
  language). Thus, English shed some of its
  regional differences and became increasingly
  standardized.
• The Renaissance is an Age of Exploration, the
  beginnings of modern science.
• Love themes are frequent in the poetry of the
  period. There is a keen interest in the new and
  exotic as well as the old and the quaint.

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Elizabethan Period/Age

• 1558-1603
• Also known as High Renaissance
• Features an explosion of cultural energy
  architects design and construct elegant mansions
  composers create new hymns for Anglican church
  service and the English madrigal, a love song
  performed without musical accompaniment and often
  by several harmonizing voices European painters
  and sculptors came to the English court to work.

6
Representative Authors

• Edmund Spenser
• Sir Philip Sidney
• William Shakespeare
• Mary Sidney Herbert
• Christopher Marlowe
• Sir Walter Raleigh
• Queen Elizabeth

7
Courtly Poetry

• The courtly love tradition dates back to the
  Middle Ages.
• Courtly love was a medieval European system of
  attitudes, myths and etiquette that spawned
  several genres of medieval literature, including
  the Romance.
• It governed the real and idealized behavior of
  knights and their ladies as they pursued one
  another in a flirting and often only in words and
  principle chaste relationship that was intended
  to flatter the lady and elevate, ennoble, and
  energize the knight.
• Although the English expression courtly love in
  general modern use means an unconsummated
  relationship, courtly love in medieval Europe was
  in fact often adulterous.
• The classic courtly love story is that of Queen
  Guinevere and Sir Lancelot.
• With the consolidation of Queen Elizabeth Is
  power, a genuine court sympathetic to poetry and
  the arts in general emerged.
• Her court thus encouraged a poetry aimed at, and
  often set in, an idealised version of the courtly
  world (the world of the monarch and nobles)
• That courtly poetry comes in two basic poetic
  forms

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Courtly Love Tradition Contd

• Lyric and Narrative Poetry
• Two Important Subcategories of Lyric Courtly
  Poetry
• 1) Sonnet and Sonnet Cycles (collection of
  sonnets loosely forming a story) in
  Italian/Petrarchan, Spenserian,
  English/Shakespearean versions
• 2) Pastorals (poems dealing with the lives of
  shepherds or rural life in general and typically
  drawing a contrast between the innocence and
  serenity of a simple life and the misery and
  corruption of city and especially court life)

• Courtly poetry is aimed at, and often set in, an
  idealised version of the courtly world (the world
  of the monarch and nobles) and comes in two basic
  poetic forms
• Characteristics of Courtly (Love) Poetry
• Highly technical, complicated form poetry, use of
  iambic pentameter with fixed rhymes and
  sophisticated imagery and figures speech,
  requiring much technical skill. (witty love
  poetry).
• The basic experiential requirements set out in
  the poem were generally quite simple
• a declaration of love to a noble and generally
  unattainable (and often cruel) lady.
• the challenge to frame one's tribute in language
  which displayed one's cleverness (one's wit) as a
  poet.

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History of the Sonnet

• The Italian Renaissance, Petrarch and the
  Petrarchan/Italian Sonnet

10
Petrarch

• Petrarch (1304-1374) is considered "the first
  writer of the Renaissance."
• His Italian sonnets rely on courtly love
  conventions.
• Petrarchan love conventions
• the poet (male) addresses a lady (corresponding
  to Petrarch's Laura).
• she often has a classical name like Stella or
  Delia.
• the poet-lover praises his mistress, the object
  and image of Love, with praise for her
  superlative qualities using descriptions of
  beauty supplied by Petrarch "golden hair,"
  "ivory breast," "ruby lips."
• the poet employs contradictory and oxymoronic
  phrases and images freezing and burning, binding
  freedom (see Petrarch's 134).
• the poet-lover dwells only on the subjective
  experience, hence on the misery of being in love
  thus the occasional appearance of the
  conventional invocation to sleep to allay the
  pain (insomnia poems).
• the poet disclaims credit for poetic merits the
  inspiration of his mistress is what makes the
  poetry good, he claims.
• the poet promises to protect the youth of his
  lady and his own love against time (through the
  immortalizing poetry itself).

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Petrarch contd

• Although some scholars see a new emphasis on the
  poets suffering self over his depiction of his
  lady, but in reality, such an emphasis is already
  at work in the courtly love poetry of the Middle
  Ages.
• As Petrarchan conventions became established, a
  simultaneous inclination to sound original
  emerged. Later sonnet developments included
• a replacement of the Petrarchan metaphor
  (expressing the unity of all things) with a
  simile drawn from common observation and direct
  perception.
• an emphasis in mode upon persuasive reasoning.
• the inclusion of physical love with the platonic.
• an increased self-consciousness about the act of
  composing itself (love poetry about love poetry).

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What is a Sonnet

• A fourteen line lyric poem that conforms to
  strict patterns of rhythm and rhyme
• Written in iambic pentameter
• Derives from the word sonetto meaning little
  sound song

• shows two related but differing things to the
  reader in order to communicate something about
  them.
• Three major types of sonnets are Italian,
  Spenserian and English)

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The Italian (Petrarchan Sonnet)

• The basic meter of all sonnets in English is
  iambic pentameter, although there have been a few
  tetrameter and even hexameter sonnets, as well.
• The Italian sonnet is divided into two sections
  by two different groups of rhyming sounds. The
  first 8 lines is called the octave and rhymes a
  b b a a b b a
• The remaining 6 lines is called the sestet and
  can have either two or three rhyming sounds,
  arranged in a variety of ways
• c d c d c dc d d c d cc d e c d ec d e c e
  dc d c e d c

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Petrarchan Sonnet contd

• The point here is that the poem is divided into
  two sections by the two differing rhyme groups.
  In accordance with the principle (which
  supposedly applies to all rhymed poetry but often
  doesn't), a change from one rhyme group to
  another signifies a change in subject matter.
  This change occurs at the beginning of L9 in the
  Italian sonnet and is called the volta, or
  "turn" the turn is an essential element of the
  sonnet form, perhaps the essential element. It is
  at the volta that the second idea is introduced,

15
Spenserian Sonnet

• The Spenserian sonnet, invented by Edmund Spenser
  as an outgrowth of the stanza pattern he used in
  The Faeire Queene (a b a b b c b c c), has the
  pattern
• a b a b b c b c c d c d e e

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English (Shakespearean) Sonnet

• The English sonnet has the simplest and most
  flexible pattern of all sonnets, consisting of 3
  quatrains of alternating rhyme and a couplet
• a b a bc b c de f e fg g

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Definition/Origin of the Pastoral

• "Pastoral" (from pastor, Latin for "shepherd")
  refers to a literary work dealing with shepherds
  and rustic or country life. Pastoral poetry is
  highly conventionalized it presents an idealized
  rather than realistic view of rustic life.

• Classical (Greek and Latin) pastoral works date
  back to the 3rd century B.C., when the Greek poet
  Theocritus wrote his Idylls about the rustic life
  of Sicily for the sophisticated citizens of the
  city of Alexandria.
• In the first century B.C., Virgil wrote Latin
  poems depicting himself and his equally
  sophisticated friends and acquaintances as
  shepherds living a simple, rural life.
• Renaissance writers expanded on these forms and
  adopted pastorals as part of the courtly poetic
  tradition.
• Shakespeare's knowledge of pastoral conventions
  was drawn both from his humanist education (which
  included Virgil and possibly Theocritus) and from
  his familiarity with the works of contemporaries
  who imitated the ancients by writing pastoral
  poetry in English.

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Topics of the Pastoral

• love, seduction
• value of poetry
• death and mourning
• corruption of the city or court vs. "purity" of
  idealized country life
• politics (generally treated satirically the
  "shepherds" critique society or easily
  identifiable political figures).

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Some Different Types of Pastorals in the
Renaissance

• Pastorals typically feature a conversation or
  dialogue (and sometimes a monologue)
• between a shepherd and the shepherdess he loves
  (generally his attempt to seduce her)
• a "singing contest" to see which shepherd is the
  better poet (a third may act as judge)
• sophisticated banter between two supposedly "rude
  swains" who discuss a lady, their flocks, or a
  current event
• a lament a dead friend (a eulogy or elegy)
• or praise a notable individual.
• Laudatory poems, laments upon a death, songs of
  courtship, complaints of a lovesick shepherd also
  occur as pastoral monologues.